A Spiro curve is a curve defined entirely by its points, you don’t have to worry about handles. The resulting curve uses the minimum possible curvature to pass through the points. The visual result is that it becomes very easy to build very natural, smooth and nice paths.

The second feature of this screencast is freehand shapes. Basically, before this the pencil tool could only draw lines of constant width, with freehand shapes, you just choose the type of line you want to draw.

Since last summer, Inkscape can directly do some raster modifications of your images inside your Inkscape files.

But unfortunately, sometimes you need to do more than this. Before this feature, the procedure was to first find where your embedded image was stored, open it in your favourite bitmap editor, save it, and reload your Inkscape canva.

Now you just have to right-click on your image, and select “Edit externally”. Your pre-configured bitmap editor will then open your image. After saving it and going back to Inkscape, the image is automatically reloaded.

The next feature I and some friends worked on as part of my student project was Live Path Effects for groups.

In the Inkscape 0.46 release, you can only apply LPE to a single path. Now with a new data structure, you can apply a LPE (or even a stack of LPE) to a group.

For some effects, such as Sketch, you only expect the effect to apply recursively to all of the group items. But what about the Bend effect? You want the whole group being deformed by the deforming path, and that’s exactly what it does.
Now you can easily live-deform a whole drawing!